Islamic Business Ethics, Muslim Feminism, and the Rhetorical Construction of Entrepreneurial Legitimacy: Evidence from Emirati Women

Abstract Despite the United Arab Emirates’ state-led promotion of women’s entrepreneurship as central to national transformation, Emirati women entrepreneurs continue to face patriarchal norms that frame entrepreneurship as a masculine domain, rendering their entrepreneurial legitimacy both precarious and contested. Based on in-depth interviews, this study examines how women entrepreneurs construct entrepreneurial legitimacy within a patriarchal Muslim context, marked by a tension between empowerment rhetoric and gendered constraints. Drawing on Suddaby and Greenwood’s (2005) framework of rhetorical legitimation together with Islamic business ethics and Muslim feminism, we demonstrate how Emirati women entrepreneurs mobilise state-led empowerment and national transformation discourses to construct entrepreneurial legitimacy. We show how they align their entrepreneurship with national development goals through teleological strategies and with globalisation through cosmological strategies. We also reveal how they employ historical strategies that draw on both Emirati and Islamic history to legitimate their entrepreneurial pursuits. The analysis further reveals how Emirati, Muslim women entrepreneurs employ a Muslim feminist perspective, reinterpreting Islamic principles and business ethics to affirm their agency and inform their ontological and value-based strategies, thereby positioning their entrepreneurship as morally grounded and socially responsible. At the intersection of Islamic business ethics, Muslim feminism, and rhetorical legitimation, our analysis reveals how rhetorical legitimacy in patriarchal religious contexts depends on prior, often invisible, feminist ethical interpretation of religious texts, thereby positioning interpretative agency as a precondition for rhetorical legitimation. This study advances scholarship on women’s entrepreneurship, business ethics, and religion by demonstrating how legitimacy is constructed through interpretative work that reconciles ethical principles with rhetorical legitimation.